Freeing Eurydice

by Bertrand Mathieu

With FREEING EURYDICE, Bertrand Mathieu, author of ORPHEUS IN BROOKLYN, delivers his most exciting and most readable work to date. This strange metaphysical adventure novel starts out in a few mundane purlieus of present-day Massachusetts and Connecticut, but it soon moves, outside Time, to Athens and a number of mystery-laden Greek islands. The narrator, who has been on the brink of total breakdown, meets and falls in love with the brilliant but erratic Greta Elspeth Brantl, who is both an astrophysicist at MIT and practicing witch in a Vermont coven. Greta impulsively decides not only to try to save her "psychic twin" but to go with him to Greece on the first leg of a bizarre personal itinerary that's designed, on the brink of the new millennium, to change life on earth for everybody! Through a weird concatenation of events, the lovers are painfully torn asunder by the appearance on the scene of the alluring vagabond-Casanova, Lucio, and the luminously beautiful Chryssa (a femme fatale from Crete who is the exact antithesis of Greta) as well as by a number of other odd mystics, poets, and plain time-servers who will exercise the power of decisively transforming the narrator's sense of what Time really means. A deeply-probing, intricately-plotted novel, filled with artful epiphanies and arresting encounters with the unforeseeable, FREEING EURYDICE draws the reader into its many-leveled labyrinth of uncanny poetic discoveries and leads to a final heart-wrenching climax that will long continue to haunt (perhaps even to transfigure) its readers' lives.

Paperback

First published August 1, 2006